Homicide

This routine little murder mystery is not so much on plot, however, I always find the movies made on ___location in the Los Angeles area in the '40s and early '50s interesting-it's nice to see that there were actually areas that were not covered with glass and concrete, before the Eastern Carpetbaggers moved in and turned the area into what they had fled, i.e. the worst of Detroit, Chicago and NYC. Another reason to recommend this one is that it features the lovely Ms. Westcott, second only in B movie beauty to Marie Windsor. Otherwise this is a routine tale of a detective hunting thieves that have turned to murder.

This is a totally unrealistic film. It is full of foolishness, illogical and stupid actions. Absolutely impossible behaviors and dialogues of real people. A squalor in all categories.

An itinerant laborer is found hanging by the rafters in his Los Angeles boardinghouse room and the cops are ready to wrte it off as a suicide. All but Detective Robert Douglas who says an ex-Navy man wouldn't have done sch a sloppy job with knots.

A book of matches takes him to a resort hotel where there was another murder that the locals have listed as an accident. of course that's not right either.

The big problem with homicide is that there is no suspense so we know that it is murder and by two men. We don't know who's in charge, but that cat's out of the bag soon too.

Despite a lack of suspense there are some good performances from Robert Douglas, Helen Westcott, and Robert Alda in the leads.

A serviceable police procedural from 1949, Homicide veers from the mildly absorbing to the silly. Its opening shows promise: A drifter just out of the Navy, looking for work as a farm hand, stumbles across a murder in an orange grove. The killers pay him off to testify that he witnessed an accident, then dispose of him too, making it look like he hanged himself in a cheap Los Angeles boarding house (its landlady is Esther Howard, best remembered as Jessie Florian in Murder, My Sweet).

One police detective (Robert Douglas) thinks there's something fishy and, going by a book of matches and a saccharin tablet, takes a leave of absence to pursue his investigation to a desert spa, where the bartender (Robert Alda) suffers from diabetes. A clue! The plot involves an underground wire used by a nationwide gambling syndicate. But Douglas, operating on his own, finds that his cover is burned and his life is in danger....

Homicide's worst misstep is in the casting of its lead. The ostentatiously British Douglas (40 at the time and looking comfortably middle-aged) is passed off as a Canadian to somehow explain his working for the LAPD. A better explanation would be why they hired a detective who's thick as a brick. The most entertaining part of the movie is listening to him try to sling American slang in his brittle B.B.C. accent; it's like watching a movie with subtitles.

This begins auspiciously but becomes implausible.

Still, it's always a treat to run into Robert Alda. And the character actress playing the landlady is the real McCoy, as are the farm folk earlier in the movie.

So many noirs are lost and forgotten, I tip my hat -- fedora, of course -- to the major cable channel that unearthed this one! May it do so with many more.